March 22, 2003 Washington, D. C. - The United States is at war with Iraq. The Homeland Security office is at Code Orange which means "High Risk of Terrorist Attacks." On Thursday, March 20, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano sent National Guard troops to the Palo Verde nuclear power plant 55 miles west of Phoenix. Two reasons were given. One was that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge asked all states with nuclear power plants to beef up security. The other reason was connected to a Washington Times report that American intelligence had information about Iraqi "sleeper cells" in the United States with plans to attack the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, the largest in the nation.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
By February 2003, more than 300 people in Guangdong Province, China, had been ill with severe respiratory distress. The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) is analyzing the medical data to determine if this is where the worldwide Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome known as "SARS," originated.
March 21, 2003 - SARS is an acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, an atypical pneumonia that rapidly attacks alveoli lung tissue. This afternoon, Julie Gerberding, M. D., Director, Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta announced that:
"Some of the individuals with the severe SARS pneumonia and death have been relatively healthy, middle-aged people, and that tells us that this is a disease that can be virulent and life-threatening, even among those who are otherwise probably immunologically healthy. ...Further, the high attack rate in health care workers caring for the early hospitalized patients ... suggests that it is certainly contagious."
- CDC is now monitoring 22 cases of the SARS pneumonia in the United States.
California 6
Hawaii 3
Maine 1
Massachusetts 1
New Jersey 1
New Mexico 1
North Carolina 2
New York 2
Rhode Island 1
Utah 1
Virginia 2
Wisconsin 1
Total Suspected U. S. Cases Under Investigation: 22
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
March 15, 2003 Salt Lake City, Utah - Late last night, I received an email from an Earthfiles viewer concerning a restaurant in Salt Lake City, Utah, that yesterday discovered seeds inside a yellow squash that were engraved with letters and symbols. One evident pattern in a photograph taken by Ryan Galbraith from The Salt Lake Tribune, shows in the lower left corner the mathematical symbol Pi (appx. 3.14159) which represents the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and appears as a constant in a wide range of mathematical problems.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
March 15, 2003 Grass Lake, Michigan - Biophysicist W. C. Levengood has been examining both normal control and body pattern samples I collected from the cotton and polyester woven bed sheet in Urandir Oliveira's home in February. The body pattern was discovered by several people at Oliveira's farm around 8 p.m. on September 15, 2002. (See previous Earthfiles reports about Corguinho, Brazil.)
This week I received photomicrographs from Levengood taken at 40X magnification under his microscope and today we discussed the images shown below with his comments.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
"I believe this is the first time we have observed a coronal mass ejection (from the sun) apparently interacting with a comet."
- Gareth Lawrence, Ph.D., Goddard Space Flight Center
Large Angle Spectrometric Coronograph (LASCO) aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite captured this image of the sun's ejection of a large plasma toward the approaching Comet NEAT on February 18, 2003 at 05:54 Universal Time. The head of the comet was estimated to be 100,000 kilometers in diameter (62,150 miles). Image courtesy of NASA/SOHO/JPL.
March 7, 2003 Greenbelt, Maryland - Comet NEAT was named after the "Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System" based at the Jet Propulsion System in Pasadena, California. NEAT's job is to monitor the solar system for comets and asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth and warn about size and nearest approach date. The comet was not discovered by the NEAT system until November 6, 2002. When it was first seen, it was extremely faint to even the most sensitive ground-based observatories. But as it moved in its orbit toward the sun, it began to brighten intensely as gas and dust cooked off the comet and deflected sunlight back towards the Earth. The comet brightened so much faster than predicted that some scientists were worried nothing would be left. At its closest to the Earth on December 24, 2002, it was .8 of an Astronomical Unit from our planet, or about 74 million miles.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
